DISCLAIMER: I have been a huge Huxley fan since middle school. I read BNW on my own... then a bunch of his collections of essays. Great stuff. Some of it was kinda hot, too.
OP's thesis is 50% right.
Yes, Huxley better predicted the use of distraction as a means of "voluntary control". But BNW reads very sci-fi. The entire human race is fundamentally, physically changed (alphas, betas, etc)
However, Orwell's world subjectively feels to me a lot more like the reality we have. No we don't have a "ministry of information", but it's a more realistic picture of a world not so far from the real one we live in.